APPLIED RESEARCH ASSOCIATES/VIRTUAL HEROES DIVISION

Company Overview

At the Virtual Heroes Division of ARA, we create innovative training and simulation solutions to improve your safety, security, and way of life. Our immersive, 3D interactive serious games and virtual worlds enhance education, training, and mission planning and rehearsal. Trainees interact in real-time, 24/7/365 virtual world platforms. Our terrain tools and standards work together to quickly funnel to the Soldier only the most useful environment data. Our terrain-generation software enables rapid generation of realistic synthetic environments for tactical operations, and our open-source, whole-earth, geo-specific modeling platform enables zooming from orbit to the Earth’s surface in real-time.

Our Visual Interaction & Conversation Editor (VICE) is a powerful, graphically-based software system for creating complex interactions between avatars in serious games. Applications may require dynamic and extensive interactions, including conversations between a player and an NPC (non-player character). VICE allows developers game-state-driven conversations and action branches in applications that use the Unreal Engine.

Our Rapid Construction of Urban Terrain Databases (RUGUD) software enables rapid generation and sharing of synthetic environments for training and testing. RUGUD produces correlated terrain databases from real-world Geographic Information System (GIS) data, pulling data from many sources and exporting to multiple 3D data formats. The software includes tools for modeling buildings (with interior layouts), tunnels, and other structures both above and below ground. RUGUD is license-free and in use by the Army simulation community to support training.